New labor plan: Nationwide protests

In a major strategic shift, the Service Employees International Union plans to use its giant political operation to try to build a grass-roots movement of public protest and organization similar to the massive show of pro-labor support that overran Madison, Wis. last month.

The SEIU’s ambitious effort is a dramatic departure from its straightforward approach to the 2008 campaign. That year, the union pressed a single-minded and ultimately successful focus on getting Democrats to commit to a health care overhaul. Then it spent more than $32.5 million in independent expenditures to elect Barack Obama.

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SEIU President Mary Kay Henry acknowledged in an interview that the new strategy, which would include aggressive outreach to non-union members, is “a risk.”

“We felt like we were called in this moment to roll the dice and to think about how to use our members resources for the greatest hope for changing members lives,” she said. “I hope what people will see is more of what we all witnessed in Madison. … more people in the streets making demands about what kind of America we want to see.”

The new plan, revealed in a planning document reviewed by POLITICO and the subsequent interview with Henry, reflects the widening recognition by labor leaders that the shrinking national ranks of union members no longer carry the political heft they once did. The draft plan, titled “Fight for a Fair Economy” in what Henry said was a preliminary planning document, would reach outside union ranks to focus on “mobilizing underpaid, underemployed, and unemployed workers” and “channeling anger about jobs into action for positive change.”

The plan does not revolve as centrally around the 2012 elections as the SEIU’s political program did in 2008, when it was the largest outside supporter of candidate Obama. It does, however, aim to organize public campaigns for economic issues around “national flash points” including this August’s recess, corporate shareholder meetings next spring, and the debates and conventions next year. Henry was elected last year with a promise to re-orient the union, and some Democratic officials worry the change will mean a less intense focus on their party’s needs.

Not the case, said Henry, who insisted that SEIU will put similar resources into the coming elections as in the last presidential cycle. SEIU reported spending $85 million on politics in 2008, including the independent expenditure program and a massive mobilization of its own members.

“We intend to have as many resources in play around the presidential in 2012 as we did in 2008,” she said.

The plan — an earlier version of which was described by The Wall Street Journal in February — anticipates beginning with a “17-city blitz” in which more than 1,500 SEIU staffers would knock on more than three million doors from Seattle to Miami in an effort to rally non-union workers to their cause.

That part of the effort will focus on areas with an average income under $35,000 annually, the document says.

Henry said the plan had broadened in the wake of what she described as the “uprising” in Wisconsin, a failed effort to block anti-union legislation and, then, to defeat a Supreme Court justice allied with Gov. Scott Walker.

“The people of Wisconsin stood up in numbers and ways that we’ve never seen before, and it turbocharged our thinking about what was possible,” Henry said.